NHS appraisal toolkit yanked offline

The UK's Department of Health has taken the highly unusual step of suddenly taking a doctors' appraisal website offline for three weeks over concerns it was vulnerable to hacking attacks.

The NHS Appraisal Toolkit was taken down on Tuesday (9 February) and is not expected to return until 3 March.

The site provides an online database that allowed NHS doctors to prepare for their annual appraisals. The database therefore contains confidential information about all GPs' performance, along with a large amount of named patient data including near diagnosis misses, critical incidents and the like.

www.appraisals.nhs.uk was pulled offline without warning to the 27,000 doctors who use it after a security audit sparked fears that the site was insecure, an NHS statement explains. It stresses that the site takedown is a precautionary move and that no attack has actually taken place.

As part of a routine security check it has been discovered that certain aspects of the electronic NHS Appraisal toolkit, established nine years ago, are not sufficiently robust to withstand modern day hacking. Ministers have immediately instructed that the website is taken offline until the supplier, SCHIN, can address these potential vulnerabilities.

The Department is aware that some of the 27,000 active users of the service will have annual appraisals planned during the period that the system will be suspended and that this will be a matter of concern to them. However, after consulting with the BMA and the RCGP, there was a shared concern to ensure that any level of security risk was dealt with as robustly and as quickly as possible.

There is no evidence of any security breach or loss of data. Given the importance of given the importance of preserving confidentiality of staff and patient information, it is not acceptable to take any risks. The Department of Health is working closely with the supplier to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible and apologises for any inconvenience this may cause doctors in the meantime. It is hoped that full service can be resumed within three weeks.

A Reg reader and doctor who first told us of the site downtime explained that the site was used by almost all GPs and many hospital doctors, adding that the takedown could hardly have happened at a worse time. "This at a a time when a huge chunk of GPs in particular are due their annual appraisals," he said. ®